


The Waiting Room

by amonitrate



Category: Supernatural, Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-08
Updated: 2010-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-24 01:04:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/amonitrate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo on a hunt in Twin Peaks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waiting Room

Deep in the woods, Washington state, night, and Jo isn't afraid of the dark.

She isn't. Not even when she stumbles into a clearing ringed with saplings, like something out of some stupid ass Grimm's fairy tale. Not even when light had flickered and strobed out of no where on the other side of the ring and she'd seen the glassy black pool in the center, reflecting only the trees. Not even when the air had shimmered and changed and a hum drifted back to her and between one blink and the next red curtains appeared, moving lightly in the breeze. Red curtains, hanging in the middle of the woods.

Maybe she wasn't afraid of the dark, but that was a mite unnerving.

It's only after she steps toward the red curtains, pushing them aside with one hand, that she realizes that the thing she was supposed to be hunting hadn't come this way at all.

  
The humming was louder here. Her boots click against the polished floor, following the black and white pattern of the tiles, and her hand drifts over the velvet of the curtains that make up the walls.

"Not in Kanas anymore, Toto," she says, and her voice echoes back to her, laughing.

  
Jo's not afraid, and maybe she should be. She follows the red curtained corridor to the end, and there's a white plaster statue of Venus there, and maybe that should seem weird but she is supposed to be in the woods right now, so on the scale of weirdness the statue is kinda near the bottom.

"Hello?" she calls, pushing aside part of the red fabric wall and slipping from the corridor into a large open room.

"Hello?" her voice drifts back to her, thin and distorted.

The room is big and empty, just black and white tile and red curtained walls and Jo thinks maybe she's fallen down the rabbit hole. None of the local lore had mentioned anything about... whatever this place was. The townfolk had been wary of the woods, sure, but that wasn't anything new, and she'd chalked it up to the thing she was hunting, the thing that wore the face of an owl and snatched little girls out of their beds at night. No one had said a peep about this Alice in  Wonderland shit.

Jo huffs out a breath. Maybe she's out there, in the woods, unconcious, and this is her hallucinating. If so, she should really wake up, because as far as hallucinations go this is just pointless, this empty film set of a room.

  
If a rabbit with a pocket watch pops up to tell her she's late for a very important date, Jo is so going to give that sucker a taste of rock salt.

  
Back out into the corridor and the statue's gone and when she retraces her steps to where she started and pushes through the heavy red curtains again she doesn't find trees on the other side at all, but another wide open room. Or maybe the same room she saw before. Only this time there's a sleek black leather couch and a torch lamp that's not plugged into anything. Jo takes a step forward and there's not a sound behind her but a displacement of air so she whirls and there she is, herself, smiling.

Jo stumbles back another step and slides the silver dagger out of the sheath at her belt.

"Shapeshifter?" she scoffs, incredulous. No one said a damn thing about shifters, either. Her research was clearly incomplete on this one. She's heard of them, of course, heard the Winchesters talk, but it's another thing entirely to have a perfect replica of yourself staring right at you, close enough to touch.

"Shapeshifter?" the thing echoes back to her, its voice hers and not hers at all, curled with mirth, like what Jo's said is the funniest thing it's heard in years. Its eyes are milky white, opaque, and it never stops smiling. It just stands there as Jo darts forward, slashing with her silver knife. Lets her cut it across the forearm, watches curiously as red blood wells up and drips to the tile floor.

Jo takes another step back before she can stop herself. "So, not a shifter, huh?"

"Not a shifter," the thing wearing her face agrees.

" _Christo_ ," Jo spits out, and the other Jo just smiles its toothy smile and doesn't flinch at all.

"What _are_ you?" Jo demands.

The other cocks her head, as if giving this thought. "What are _you_?" it asks back.

"I didn't come here to discuss philosophy," Jo snaps. "What is this place?"

The thing stares at her like it doesn't understand the question. Or maybe more like it doesn't understand why she's even asking.

"This place..." it trails off. Gives her a wide grin.

"Quote the Eagles at me and die," Jo says, gripping her sawed-off. The thing looks like her, is wearing her clothes, but it doesn't have any weapons. Unless you count the creepy smile as a weapon, and Jo's starting to think maybe she should. "Whatever. Enough of this crap."

Jo gives the other a wide berth as she walks past it and finds the gap in the curtains again. Empty hallway going nowhere. The lights flicker overhead, but when she tilts her head up there isn't a ceiling, just black, like the night sky. The humming swells around her and her boots thunk on the tile as she stalks back to the other end of the hall and yeah, when she presses through the curtains again at the other end, she's not surpised at all to find herself back in that same room. Everything spotless. Black couch, lamp, and this time the statue of Venus is there too.

She didn't hear anything behind her, but she knows the thing that looks like her is there, dogging her steps. Jo doesn't bother to turn around.

"How do I get out of this place?" she asks, not really expecting an answer.

She isn't disappointed. "Out?" the other Jo asks. And damn if she can't hear the grin in the word, but there's puzzlement there too.

Jo isn't afraid of the dark, but this place is starting to tug at her nerves. It's the hum. And the empty feeling, even in the room with the couch. And maybe, yeah, maybe having the spitting image of herself following her around like an eager puppy. An eager, creepy-ass puppy. The kind that looks cute enough until you turn your back on it and do something stupid like freak out and run.

So she sidesteps, keeping the thing in her sight, and does a search of the room's perimeter. The other her follows about three steps back, watching her with a curiousity Jo doesn't want to think too much about, like it's waiting for her to do something.

There's nothing to find in the room but curtains. She can't see what's holding them up.

When she turns back around, there's a man sitting in a black leather chair by the couch.

"Whoa," Jo says.

"Wow," the other Jo grins.

The chair hadn't been there a minute ago. Neither had the man, but that goes without saying. He's a little older than Dean, maybe in his early thirties, handsome in an overly clean-cut kind of way, and he's wearing a black suit. Looks like a fed. A real fed, not the cheap hunter knockoff.

"You don't belong here," he says slowly, looking just as surprised as she feels.

"You don't belong here," the other Jo says back to him.

He frowns, and then shakes his head. "No, I don't." His expression goes even more serious, something Jo wouldn't have thought possible. "Don't run," he says to Jo. "Don't run from it."

Jo glances at the other Jo and shrugs. "Why would I run?"

He doesn't answer. "How long have you been here?" the man asks instead.

Jo's tired and wants nothing more to sink down onto that couch but somehow that seems too much like acknowledging she's really in this fucked up place. "Dunno. An hour? What about you? What is this place?"

The man tilts his head. "What year is it?"

Jo blinks. "You're shitting me. You don't know what year it is?"

"I've been here a long time," the man says. So she tells him, and he nods once. "Longer than I thought, then."

"How long is long?"

The resignation on his face isn't helping her nerves any. "Twenty years."

"Where the fuck is here anyway?" she asks, because clearly the guy is nuts if he thinks he's been here for nearly as long as Jo's been alive.

"I've been told it's the waiting room," the man answers.

Beside her, the other Jo nods. "The waiting room."

"Waiting for what?" Jo snaps. "If you've been here twenty years, what the fuck are you waiting for?"

The guy doesn't answer that, and maybe he doesn't know. The other Jo smiles her secretive smile and nods. "What are you waiting for?" she asks Jo.

Jo tries to leave them both behind her in that room, but the next time she turns around, there she is.

  
Twenty years. Fuck. Jo is not staying in this place for another day, let alone a year. Let alone twenty.

She doesn't see the fed again. Far as she can tell, this place is made up of one hallway connecting two identical rooms. So its not like there's anywhere for him to go, but clearly the space-time continuum is utterly fucked here.

"It's like a fun house, only someone forgot the fun," she mutters. She's so bored she's forgotten to be scared.

"Always wanted a sister," Jo says. She's sitting on the cool tile floor of the hall, knee to knee with herself. "Didn't really want a twin, though. Or a clone. That what you are?"

The other Jo just grins her empty grin. "Always wanted a sister," she says.

Jo rolls her eyes. "That's not creepy at all."

This time when she steps into the hall, there are footsteps behind her, fast, like running. Jo turns, and the other Jo turns with her, and there's something chasing them, and they both run. There's no where to go but back into one of the rooms and Jo pushes through the curtains and the room's empty this time, and the other Jo is right beside her and she's not smiling anymore. Not at all.

The lights flicker and strobe and there's a growling, like something hungry and barking channeled through a human throat. When Jo turns, her silver knife in one hand, her shotgun held out in the other, the other Jo stops beside her, hands open and weaponless.

Shadows flicker and jump in the strobe and Jo's not afraid of the dark. "Here," she says to the other Jo, and thrusts the knife into her hands. "You got my back?"

The other Jo grins again but it's terrified and joyous all at once. "Got my back," she says, and nods.

And it's the thing Jo had been hunting, the thing the locals won't talk about, a wiry man in dirty jeans and stringy long hair, smile more hellish than any demon's, and in the stuttering light his face shifts and changes, an owl, another man, a burst of fire.

Jo's not afraid of the dark, but this thing scares her deep down to the core.

"Don't run," the other Jo says, and steps towards the man, raises her silver knife. "Don't run," she says, and the man roars.

Jo stumbles, goes down on her hands and knees, her forehead hitting dirt.  When the dizziness passes and she blinks the dark from her eyes, she sits back on her heels and feels the sun on her face, filtered down through the canopy of trees.

Alone.  



End file.
